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Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Touchscreen devices became such a hit these days, from your smartphones, tablet PCs all the way up to hybrid laptops, these gadgets which can easily manipulated by a single touch of your fingertips had changed the course of the 21st century. With such devices, have it ever crossed your mind, the possibility of a touchscreen printer, because Artefact had.

Artefact is "an award-winning technology product design company dedicated to defining next-generation products and user experiences", had come up with a 21st century design of a touchscreen printer that looks a lot like a tablet PC intact in a portable printing machine, otherwise known as the See What You Print touchscreen printer--"a concept to bring the printer to the 21st century, by stripping it down of its cumbersomeness" as what Artefact had described it.

Designed by Jonas Buck, Fernd Van Engelen and Tucker Spofford, the See What You Print or simply called SWYP is a sleek modern design printer that can easily connect wirelessly in your mobile devices, laptops or computers to print images and photographs. What's more is it can edit, format, change contrast and design photographs from it instead in your computing device.

According to Artefact's official website, the SWYP offers the following advantages over the other modern-type printers:

Margins and scaling can be easily previewed and edited on the touch-screen before printing. Just like you would do with the real paper.

Color results become predictable with a screen that is always calibrated to the printer.

Unwanted print areas are easily spotted and can be removed by simply ‘swyping’ it off the screen.

Printing from a camera becomes straightforward even without a computer. The camera connects wirelessly to the printer and images can be selected, arranged and lightly edited in seconds.

You can personalize the start screen and create a network of personal devices or online sources for direct printing.

You can directly connect to Facebook photo stream and Flickr to print photos.

Paper tray: on most current printers the paper trays become very cumbersome complicated parts.

Peek inside: selecting the ink icon lets the interface fade away and reveals the inside of the printer with ink level and inserted paper type information augmented on top of it.

No on/off button: the act of opening or closing the paper tray turns the printer on or off.

Although the See What You Print remains a concept for now, there are speculations that the major printing company Hewlett Packard is interested in buying it and perhaps manufacturing the said printer in the near future. The See What You Print, in regards with its design, will probably be using solid inks similar to Xerox instead of laser toner cartridges or ink cartridges in printing.